Group Video Tutorial PART A - Brainstorm Session/Web-Conferencing

This post will be about my experience with video conferencing. We held a few video conferences today using Adobe Connect.

Our Video conference served two purposes. One was to learn video conferencing and two was to brainstorm about our group tutorial project design.

Prior to the conference our group had good brainstorming done in both google docs as well as through angel posts. Below is a link to our google document brainstorming and a screenshot of our angel brainstorming posts.

Google Document

after deciding to use Vyew as our video conferencing tool, Dan and I hopped on Sunday morning and to our dismay Vyew was down and you could not log in as a member...Dan was still able to create a room and we attempted to communicate in that room but were unable to find how to communicate though microphones and were stuck writing in the chat box.  The best we could figure was that you had to be logged in as a member in order to use mics.  I then called an audible and signed up for a free trial of adobe connect and we jumped ship to the adobe room I created.  Some advantages we found of adobe connect was that it was extremely user friendly and easy to create a free account.  It literally took less that 2 minutes to set up an account and get a room up and running.  Within the room, it was very easy to start communicating through our webcams.  It wasn't as easy to fine-tune the audio so we didn't get echoing but still was not difficult.  Adobe immediately provided a URL for me to copy into our Google Doc so that Dan and Becky could enter the room.

Some downsides to Adobe connect is that they have no extended free version.  My free trial ends in 15 days and I would then need to purchase a version or switch to a different video conferencing tool.  Another disadvantage is that Adobe's free trial does not allow you to record the meetings for later playback.  To do this we had to use Screencast-o-matic.com (SOM) and we were then obligated to keeping the meeting under 15 minutes as this is the longest SOM will allow.

If I were to do this over again, I would try and hold my video conference on a day that I was not under time constraints and I would enter the room before the meeting so that I was very familiar with all aspects of the video conferencing tool.  Therefore, I would be able and answer as many questions or address as many problems as possible.  I see video conferencing in general being useful in my classroom by allowing us to go on virtual field trips (for free) to many different science careers and actually get to talk with people who make science their life.  I can also see creating virtual office hours on a given night for students to be able to ask questions if they were having difficulty on an assignment. (although that would take some ironing out before I could put into practice).

Overall the video conference went very well and as a good experience to go through.

Here are a few screenshots of us using Adobe Connect

Using the chat window

 Sharing Screens

Shared notes window

On to the nuts and bolts of the video blog.  We have decided that to make a tutorial on a few of the basics of Moodle the online management system.  We will be teaching how to make a lesson on moodle with embeded video and guided questions.  We have chosen to divide the tutorial into 3 equal parts and will be using screencast-o-matic to record our sections and then use windows movie maker to piece them all together.  Becky will be demonstrating how to begin creating a lesson in Moodle, I will be demonstrating how to embed a video and ways around YouTube and Dan will be demonstrating how to add questions with guided responses.  We have agreed to all look into getting a dummy Moodle class set up, one that all of us will have access to so we all can work on the same lesson.  We are trying to get this set up by Tuesday and will be communicating on our Google document throughout the week.

Below are the two links to our web conference

LINK TO FIRST CONFERENCE:11AM Dan and Scott
http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cXf6D2DfI

LINK TO SECOND CONFERENCE: 8PM Dan, Scott and Becky
http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cXfXctDfJ